Introduction

The mental model theory of reasoning was developed by Philip Johnson-Laird

Philip Johnson-Laird

Philip Johnson-Laird is a professor at Princeton University's Department of Psychology and author of several notable books on human cognition and the psychology of reasoning....

 and Ruth M.J. Byrne (Johnson-Laird and Byrne, 1991). It has been applied to the main domains of deductive inference including relational inferences such as spatial and temporal deductions; propositional inferences, such as conditional, disjunctive and negation deductions; quantified inferences such as syllogisms; and meta-deductive inferences.

Ongoing research on mental models and reasoning has led the theory to be extended to account for probabilistic inference (e.g., Johnson-Laird, 2006) and counterfactual thinking

Counterfactual thinking

Counterfactual thinking is a term of psychology that describes the tendency people have to imagine alternatives to reality. Humans are predisposed to think about how things could have turned out differently if only..., and also to imagine what if?....

(Byrne, 2005).